BLOGS

Featured Posts (3487)

Sort by

A Need For Starships...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on January 27, 2017 at 6:00am
Popular Mechanics (Discovery 1: 2001 - A Space Odyssey): What Would a Starship Actually Look Like?

Topics: NASA, Politics, Space Exploration, Star Trek

Star Trek was born in the 1960's during counter-culture demonstrations against the Vietnam War; for the Civil Rights Act (1964), Voting Rights Act (1965) and Fair Housing Act (1968). It was a decade of assassinations: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy. It was an admittedly Pollyannaish futurism with fantastic technologies beyond the capabilities of our physics likely now and in the near future. From my perspective as an African American and a budding science nerd, it was a hope beyond the fear of nations annihilating each other, and that we'd stop fretting like paranoid, prehistoric Neanderthals over the magical powers of Melanin.

A recurring theme from old to new Trek is Native Americans. In Kirk's timeline, they were excavated from Earth by the aliens called the Preservers, resulting in temporary amnesia for James T and a stoned (the rocks kind) pregnant wife.

In the Next Generation, Picard met a tribe that left Terra on their own in the 22nd Century, using the fantastically impossible warp drive because we hadn't gotten to the Utopia of a United Federation of Planets. Ironically, they were again being asked to move, this time from a contested colonial planet between Federation and Cardassians.

Chakotay is described as a starfleet tactical officer, Maquis terrorist and Native American descendant: A renaissance man of sorts in the 24th Century. The Next Gen tie-in was his father died defending their home world on the same Cardassian outpost. As with a lot of Trek stories, his father would talk to him on vision quests in his often expressed Mayan spiritual traditions (i.e. no one ever really dies).

Boomers in the 22nd Century were people that lived most of their lives in space, many of them people of color as evidenced by Ensign Travis Mayweather.

Lastly, in the novel Federation, Zephram Cochrane‎ apparently released the plans for warp drive on the Internet: for the low price of $50,000 (which I assume covers radiation shielding) you too would go faster-than-light to (presciently) Alpha Centauri.

The Venn Diagram of the three previous examples I've given is a suggested departure, an Exodus from Mother Earth to a kind of Elysium without dying. The former Native Americans carried with them their culture and traditions as I'm sure Mayweather and his family carried theirs. Perhaps Roddenberry and subsequent writers were suggesting a social pressure for Earthlings to finally listen to their better angels, kind of a societal potty-training (embarrassment can be an effective motivator).

It occurred to me: what if we COULD voluntarily leave? At one-tenth the speed of light (0.10 c) would involve time dilation, so for every year on your starship several years (if not decades or centuries, depending on the destination) would pass on Earth. Whatever problems you experienced with say, discrimination and xenophobia (traffic tickets, or worse) would be consumed by considerable distance and time. What would be the reaction of "powers that be?" A backlash, perhaps? "Legal" blocks put in to keep humans planet-bound, preventing pilgrims to the stars on an "over-ground railroad?" It's hard to reinforce a hierarchical society of implicit bias and income inequality when The Untouchables (traditional and figurative) decide to leave the planetary caste system.

We are bound by our own terrestrial limits and tribal prejudices. We are stymied by our fears of the unknown; of "the other"; of facts that don't comport to our preconceived notions and beliefs. Lacking critical thinking and reasoning skills, we violently fight the unknown, the only outcome being the eventual destruction of that which is feared, or self-destruction by one's own fears.

Spaceflight is not trivial: radiation (as I've mentioned), lack of gravity causing muscle deterioration and mineral loss from bones; long-term weightlessness seems to result in nearsightedness in astronauts on the ISS. Not to mention: food, and bathrooms (delicately, someone's going to have to figure out how to have sex in less than 1 g). Near-miraculous technologies like 0.10 c propulsive acceleration, rotating habitats to simulate gravity and adequate radiation shielding have yet to be created. Such design breakthroughs require an environment a little less hostile to science and facts as I'm currently observing in the US.

The need for the overview effect on an extensive, massive scale, seeing ourselves teamed to survive even as close as Mars, or mining the asteroid belts. Space programs such as that of a starship or interplanetary engines requires cooperation across borders and economies; across cultures and religious differences. It's hard to war with the other when the same shared goal is surviving to the next day.

Currently, homophobia, racism, sexism, xenophobia (translate: fear, the bedrock of hierarchical, caste-based societies) and consumer driven, cronyism-rewarding technology is threatening the continued existence of the species.

A visible hope: I had meant to complete "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison last Friday during my fast from the inaugural festivities. My small stance seemed to have contributed an effect.

At a local restaurant, I was reading the book waiting for my meal in front of a gas-powered fireplace, decorated with the head of a buck, the portrait of a couple (likely, the owner-founders); a fireman's cap, a safety cap, waffle iron and snow shoes.

A gentleman was sitting with who appeared to me his father and son, three generations enjoying a late breakfast at Cracker Barrel. He noticed my book and it sparked a conversation: I found out he had read the book, loaned to him by his best friend. He raved about it, describing details from the first part of it only someone who had read it would know (specifically, New York fight clubs). At his friend's untimely death at 26, he found a photo of he and his friend in Prague inside the pages. He described his cherub, blonde son as a "miracle baby": he and his wife had tried to adopt 3 times unsuccessfully. His wife was finally pregnant, long enough for his mother to see his son's "bump." She died two months before he was born. I told him how old my adult sons were and to enjoy his. All this from a book I neglected to finish last week. I'm glad I didn't and appreciative of the human connection it fostered. I plan to complete it this week. The hard copy of "1984" is currently out-of-stock on Amazon. As apropos as it is, I recommend this and other classics as we grope through this current darkness.

Earth and Vulcan apparently survived their fictional world wars and flights of emotion and irrationality that led to them. An initial Exodus (Earthlings to Centauri; Vulcans to Romulus) pushed their fictional societies towards an overview enlightenment.

But things only happen perfectly in Star Trek, such that life may NOT imitate art.
Read more…

Ode to Buzz Lightyear...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on January 23, 2017 at 9:50am
Artist's illustration of the New Horizons spacecraft flying by the Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69 on Jan. 1, 2019 Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI/Alex Parker
Topics: NASA, Planetary Science, Pluto, Space Exploration, Spaceflight
To Pluto and beyond!
Nearly two years after its historic encounter with the dwarf planet Pluto, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is getting ready for its next big adventure in the icy outskirts of the solar system.
Now, the spacecraft is on its way to a small, ancient object located about 1 billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) beyond Pluto in the Kuiper Belt. This distant region surrounds the solar system and is filled with trillions of icy rocks that have yet to be explored. The new target was discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope in June 2014, and it was dubbed 2014 MU69.
A world of discoveries
It took the spacecraft about 16 months to beam back all of its data from the Pluto flyby, and planetary scientists have had a ball with that data.
"The New Horizons flyby of the Pluto system was completely successful, and now we've got all the data on the ground and we're putting a bow around it," Alan Stern, the New Horizons principal investigator at Southwest Research Institute, said in a Facebook Live event on Thursday (Jan. 19).
Thanks to New Horizons, scientists now have a global map of Pluto and the most detailed images yet of the dwarf planet's bizarre, mountainous landscape and icy volcanoes. Tall mountain ranges seen on Pluto also suggest recent geological activity on the dwarf planet's surface.
Space.com: Beyond Pluto: NASA's New Horizons Spacecraft Heads to Next AdventureHanneke Weitering, Staff Writer-Producer
Read more…

Recipe For Time Crystals...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on January 24, 2017 at 6:29am
Figure 1: Yao et al. [7] have developed a blueprint for creating a time crystal and a method for detecting it, which has been followed by two experimental groups [8, 9]. Quantum spins are subjected to imperfect spin-flip driving pulses and then allowed to interact with each other in the presence of strong random disorder in the local magnetic fields. The sequence repeats after a total time period T, but the spin system exhibits emergent oscillations with period 2T—the hallmark of a discrete quantum time crystal. [Credit: APS/Alan Stonebraker/Phil Richerme]


Topics: Computer Science, Quantum Computer, Quantum Mechanics, Theoretical Physics


A detailed theoretical recipe for making time crystals has been unveiled and swiftly implemented by two groups using vastly different experimental systems.

The story of time crystals—whose lowest-energy configurations are periodic in time rather than space—epitomizes the creative ideas, controversy, and vigorous discussion that lie at the core of the scientific process. Originally theorized by Frank Wilczek in 2012 [1] (see 15 October 2012 Viewpoint), time crystals were met with widespread attention, but also a healthy dose of skepticism [2]. This ignited a debate in the literature, culminating in a proof that time crystals cannot exist in thermal equilibrium, as originally imagined by Wilczek [3]. But the tale did not end there. It was later argued that time crystals might still be possible in periodically driven systems, which can never reach thermal equilibrium [4–6]. Three recent papers have now completed the story, one proposing a roadmap for creating a nonequilibrium time crystal in the lab [7], and two describing subsequent experimental demonstrations in systems of trapped ions [8] and spin impurities in diamond [9] (both posted on the physics arXiv preprint server).

Empty space exhibits continuous translation symmetry: nothing distinguishes one point from any other. Yet ordinary crystals break this symmetry because atoms are periodically arranged in specific locations and display long-range spatial correlations. Given that we live in four-dimensional spacetime, it is natural to wonder if an analogous process of crystallization and symmetry breaking can arise along the time dimension as well [1]. If it does, then any such time crystal should return back to its initial state at specific times, while spontaneously locking to an oscillation period that differs from that of any external time-dependent forces. Hence this definition excludes all known classical oscillatory systems such as waves or driven pendulums.

APS Physics Viewpoint: How to Create a Time Crystal, Phil Richerme
#P4TC: Time Crystals, October 13, 2016

Read more…

Euler's Method...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on January 17, 2017 at 9:30am
From Notes on Diffy Qs: Differential Equations for Engineers, by Jirí Lebl

"What if we want to find the value of the solution at some particular x? Or perhaps we want to produce a graph of the solution to inspect the behavior. In this section we will learn about the basics of numerical approximation of solutions.

The simplest method for approximating a solution is Euler’s method. It works as follows: We take x0 and compute the slope k = f (x0; y0). The slope is the change in y per unit change in x. We follow the line for an interval of length h on the x axis. Hence if y = y0 at x0, then we will say that y1 (the approximate value of y at x1 = x0 + h) will be y1 = y0 + hk. Rinse, repeat! That is, compute x2 and y2 using x1 and y1." See Notes on Diffy Qs above (under graphic)


 Topics: Differential Equations, Diversity in Science, Mathematics, Women in Science

Okay, this is the LAST time I'll talk about Hidden Figures (although I did order the book).

Not to spoil it for you, but Dr. Katherine Johnson (played by Taraji P. Henson) mentioned an "old method" of mathematics. What both the actress and NASA scientist referred to is something you're taught usually sophomore year in a STEM major. Euler's Method is named after Leonhard Euler, and it's used to numerically approximate differential equations, something in the movie and the embed below alludes to is now done by what we now know as computers (the laptop kind, not female mathematicians).

It is important to understand the steps, derivation and mathematics behind computer calculation. How do you KNOW it's right? I'm often challenged as to "when I ever use Calculus" at work. Most often they're right, I don't. There's a software package designed with the equations embed within them to literally SPIT out an answer. The program doesn't have imagination nor does it visualize an expected end result. "The answer" is the end of a calculation without any notion of its consequences if incorrect.

Part of its practicality is essentially how the study of mathematics and physics organizes one's thinking. I use systematic approaches to solving just about any problem in life. However in Hidden Figures, it was initially the NASA scientists and eventually Dr. Johnson knowing the mathematics and relying on human insight and intuition that averted catastrophe, not that it doesn't happen when launching humans on the top of essentially systematic staged bombs to achieve Earth orbit.

The old riddle "which came first: the chicken or the egg?" can easily be answered with regards to computers and humans. The Singularity will have a ways yet.

François Arago said of him (Euler) "He calculated just as men breathe, as eagles sustain themselves in the air" (Beckmann 1971, p. 143; Boyer 1968, p. 482). [1]

In a testament to Euler's proficiency in all branches of mathematics, the great French mathematician and celestial mechanic Laplace told his students, "Liesez Euler, Liesez Euler, c'est notre maître à tous" ("Read Euler, read Euler, he is our master in everything" (Beckmann 1971, p. 153). [2]

1, 2: Scienceworld.Wolfram.com: Euler
LA Times:
Meet the ‘Hidden Figures’ mathematician who helped send Americans into space, Amina Khan

Read more…

Cosmic Mystery...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on January 18, 2017 at 2:38pm
Figure 1: Both the LUX and PandaX-II experiments look for dark matter particles (Chi-Chi) by sensing their interaction with xenon atoms. The detector in each experiment consists of a large tank of ultrapure liquid xenon (dark purple) topped with xenon gas (light purple). An interaction produces two light signals, one from photons, S1, and another, S2, from electrons when they drift into the gas. The signals are detected by photomultiplier tubes at the top and bottom of the tank (yellow cylinders). [Credit: APS/Carin Cain]


Topics: Astronomy, Astrophysics, Cosmology, Dark Matter


Over 80 years ago astronomers and astrophysicists began to inventory the amount of matter in the Universe. In doing so, they stumbled into an incredible discovery: the motion of stars within galaxies, and of galaxies within galaxy clusters, could not be explained by the gravitational tug of visible matter alone [1]. So to rectify the situation, they suggested the presence of a large amount of invisible, or “dark,” matter. We now know that dark matter makes up 84% of the matter in the Universe [2], but its composition—the type of particle or particles it’s made from—remains a mystery. Researchers have pursued a myriad of theoretical candidates, but none of these “suspects” have been apprehended. The lack of detection has helped better define the parameters, such as masses and interaction strengths, that could characterize the particles. For the most compelling dark matter candidate, WIMPs, the viable parameter space has recently become smaller with the announcement in September 2016 by the PandaX-II Collaboration [3] and now by the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) Collaboration [4] that a search for the particles has come up empty.

Since physicists don’t know what dark matter is, they need a diverse portfolio of instruments and approaches to detect it. One technique is to try to make dark matter in an accelerator, such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and then to look for its decay products with a particle detector. A second technique is to use instruments such as the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope to observe dark matter interactions in and beyond our Galaxy. This approach is called “indirect detection” because what the telescope actually observes is the particles produced by a collision between dark matter particles. In the same way that forensic scientists rely on physical evidence to reverse-engineer a crime with no witnesses, scientists use the aftermath of these collisions to reconstruct the identities of the initial dark matter particles.

The third technique, and the one used in both the LUX and PandaX-II experiments, is known as “direct detection.” Here, a detector is constructed on Earth with a massive target to increase the odds of an interaction with the dark matter that exists in our Galaxy. In the case of LUX and PandaX-II, the dark matter particles leave behind traces of light that can be detected with sophisticated sensors. This is akin to having placed cameras at the scene of a crime, capturing the culprit in the act.

The heart of both LUX, located in South Dakota in the US, and PandaX-II, situated in Sichuan, China, is a time-projection chamber. This consists of a large tank of ultrapure liquid xenon—250 kg at LUX and 500 kg at PandaX-II—topped with xenon gas (Fig. 1). A particle (dark matter or ordinary matter) that enters the chamber and interacts with a xenon atom in the liquid generates photons (by scintillation) and electrons (by ionization). The photons produce a signal, S1, which is read by photomultiplier tubes located at the top and bottom of the tank. The electrons are instead coaxed into the gaseous portion of the detector by an electric field where they induce a second round of scintillation and a signal S2. The pattern of S1 and S2 signals is different when the xenon interacts with a dark matter particle than with an ordinary particle, which is what allows scientists to distinguish between two such events. To reduce the background signal from ordinary particles, both LUX and PandaX-II are buried underground to provide protection from cosmic rays. In addition, the use of ultrapure materials in the construction of the experiment cuts the background contributed by radioactive emissions.

APS Viewpoint: Dark Matter Still at Large
Jodi A. Cooley, Department of Physics, Southern Methodist University, 3215 Daniel Ave., Dallas, TX 75205, USA
January 11, 2017• Physics 10, 3

Read more…

Afrofuturist Artists Craft A Virtual World For Women Of Color

Posted by William Hayashi on January 19, 2017 at 4:10am

It was the summer of 2016 and molecular and cellular biologist/multidisciplinary artist Ashley Baccus-Clark was gifting herself a day of self-care. The police shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile had left her, like so many black Americans, anguished and weary. She tried to ease her heartache by visiting Storm King, the 500-acre sculpture park in upstate New York where hulking man-made forms dwell among rolling green fields.

Click here for the full article

Read more…

Intrinsic Disorder...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on January 19, 2017 at 7:55am
Ricardo Bessa for Quanta Magazine


Topics: Biology, Biochemistry, Biophysics, Research


Proteins work like rigid keys to activate cellular functions — or so everyone thought. Scientists are discovering a huge number of proteins that shape-shift to do their work, upending a century-old maxim of biology.

Structure equals function: If there’s one thing we all learned about proteins in high school biology, that would be it. According to the textbook story of the cell, a protein’s three-dimensional shape determines what it does — drive chemical reactions, pass signals up and down the cell’s information superhighway, or maybe hang molecular tags onto DNA. For more than a century, biologists have thought that the proteins carrying out these functions are like rigid cogs in the cell’s machinery.

Of course, exceptions would occasionally crop up. A scientist might bump into a protein that performed its functions perfectly well yet didn’t have rigid structures. Most researchers chalked these cases up to experimental error, or dismissed them as insignificant outliers.

More recently, however, biologists have begun paying attention to these shapeshifters. Their findings are tearing down the structure-function dogma.

Proteins are chains of strung-together amino acids, and recent studies estimate that up to half of the total amino acid sequence that makes up proteins in humans doesn’t fold into a distinct shape. (While some of the proteins that make up this total are unstructured from end to end, others contain long unstructured regions side-by-side with structured ones.) “Partly, people didn’t realize how big that number was, and that’s why they ignored it,” said Julie Forman-Kay, a biochemist at the Hospital for Sick Children and the University of Toronto. “And partly they just didn’t know what to think of it.”

This fluidity — dubbed “intrinsic disorder” — endows proteins with a set of superpowers that structured proteins don’t have. Folded proteins tend to bind to their targets firmly, like a key in a lock, at just one or two spots, but their more stretched-out wiggly cousins are like molecular Velcro, attaching lightly at multiple locations and releasing with ease. This quick-on-quick-off binding’s effect in the cell is huge: It allows intrinsically disordered proteins — or IDPs, for short — to receive and respond to a slew of molecular messages simultaneously or in rapid succession, essentially positioning them to serve as cellular messaging hubs, integrating these multiple signals and switching them on and off in response to changes in the cell’s environment and to keep cellular processes ticking along as they should.

Quanta Magazine: The Shape-Shifting Army Inside Your Cells
Alla Katsnelson

Read more…

Squeezing Below The Quantum Limit...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on January 16, 2017 at 10:37am




NIST researchers applied a special form of microwave light to cool a microscopic aluminum drum to an energy level below the generally accepted limit, to just one fifth of a single quantum of energy. Having a diameter of 20 micrometers and a thickness of 100 nanometers, the drum beat 10 million times per second while its range of motion fell to nearly zero.

Credit: Teufel/NIST

Topics: Metamaterials, Nanotechnology, Quantum Computer, Quantum Mechanics


Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have cooled a mechanical object to a temperature lower than previously thought possible, below the so-called “quantum limit.”

The new NIST theory and experiments, described in the Jan. 12, 2017, issue of Nature, showed that a microscopic mechanical drum—a vibrating aluminum membrane—could be cooled to less than one-fifth of a single quantum, or packet of energy, lower than ordinarily predicted by quantum physics. The new technique theoretically could be used to cool objects to absolute zero, the temperature at which matter is devoid of nearly all energy and motion, NIST scientists said.

“The colder you can get the drum, the better it is for any application,” said NIST physicist John Teufel, who led the experiment. “Sensors would become more sensitive. You can store information longer. If you were using it in a quantum computer, then you would compute without distortion, and you would actually get the answer you want.”


 NIST Physicists ‘Squeeze’ Light to Cool Microscopic Drum Below Quantum Limit
Laura Ost
Read more…

Fusion Breeding...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on January 11, 2017 at 8:35pm
Image Source: Binus University Research Interest Group


Topics: Alternative Energy, Nuclear Fusion, Nuclear Physics, Nuclear Power

 Abstract

This article is an editorial, which makes the case that fusion breeding (that is using fusion neutrons to breed nuclear fuel for use in conventional nuclear reactors) is the best objective for the fusion program. To make the case, it reviews a great deal of plasma physics and fusion data. Fusion breeding could potentially play a key role in delivering large-scale sustainable carbon-free commercial power by mid-century. There is almost no chance that pure fusion can do that. The leading magnetic fusion concept, the tokamak, is subject to well-known constraints, which we have called conservative design rules, and review in this paper. These constraints will very likely prevent tokamaks from ever delivering economical pure fusion. Inertial fusion, in pure fusion mode, may ultimately be able to deliver commercial power, but the failure to date of the leading inertial fusion experiment, the National Ignition Campaign, shows that there are still large gaps in our understanding of laser fusion. Fusion breeding, based on either magnetic fusion or inertial fusion, greatly relaxes the requirements on the fusion reactor. It is also a much better fit to today’s and tomorrow’s nuclear infrastructure than is its competitor, fission breeding. This article also shows that the proposed fusion and fission infrastructure, ‘The Energy Park’, reviewed here, is sustainable, economically and environmentally sound, and poses little or no proliferation risk.

Introduction

The fusion program, both short term and long term, is in trouble, certainly in the United States, and likely worldwide. In addition to large cost overruns and failures to meet milestones, surely another reason is that pure fusion has almost no chance of meeting energy requirements on a time scale that anyone alive today can relate to. Hence the assertion of this article is that fusion breeding of conventional nuclear fuel is a likely way out of fusion’s current and future difficulties. Fusion breeding substantially reduces the requirements on the fusion reactor. It significantly reduces the necessary Q (fusion power divided by input power), wall loading, and availability fraction. The capital cost of a reactor, estimated based on ITER’s capital cost, is affordable for fusion breeding, but definitely is not for pure fusion. It is likely that fusion breeding can produce fuel at a reasonable cost by mid century. The entire fusion and fission infrastructure would be sustainable, economical, environmentally sound, and have little or no proliferation risk. This article’s mission then, is to hopefully convince a much larger portion of the fusion establishment to make this case. At the very least it hopes to broaden the discussion in the fusion community from where we are now, where one prestigious review committee after another insists that every existing project is absolutely vital, nothing can be changed; except give us more $$$. The inevitable result of this process is that one fusion project after another gets knocked off.



 RD Springer: Fusion Breeding for Mid-Century Sustainable Power, Wallace Manheimer

Read more…

Brexit and Exodus...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on January 10, 2017 at 9:30am
Image Source: Wiki Gender

Topics: Existentialism, Politics, Science, Research

A survey of more than 1,000 UK-based university staff suggests that the country’s vote to leave the European Union could drive an academic exodus.

Forty-two per cent of lecturers and professors surveyed say they are more likely to consider leaving the UK higher-education sector as a result of the referendum outcome. The proportion was even greater (76%) among the non-UK EU citizens in the survey, commissioned by the University and College Union, which represents tens of thousands of academics and is based in London.

Many individual foreign researchers have said they feel less welcome in Britain after the Brexit vote, or that they now see better opportunities abroad. But the latest poll is one of the clearest indications of the widespread nature of this feeling in UK academia.


 Scientific American: Brexit May Spark British Brain Drain, Daniel Cressey
Read more…

blerdsunite

Posted by Tywon Terrell on January 9, 2017 at 2:14pm

I guess life does come full circle, I haven't been on here in a long time. I have started tweeting up under the name @blerdsunite and I will be launching a group on FB soon followed by the website. On twitter what i'm basically doing is highlighting  a lot of different black artist, authors, illustrators, graphic designers, musicians, scientists etc. Instead of focusing on the standard Blerd topics which cover a lot of the mainstream I try to include all, but "us" in particular. Check me out, i'm finally back!!! 

Read more…

Lucy and Psyche...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on January 9, 2017 at 2:50pm
(Left) An artist’s conception of the Lucy spacecraft flying by the Trojan Eurybates – one of the six diverse and scientifically important Trojans to be studied. Trojans are fossils of planet formation and so will supply important clues to the earliest history of the solar system. (Right) Psyche, the first mission to the metal world 16 Psyche will map features, structure, composition, and magnetic field, and examine a landscape unlike anything explored before. Psyche will teach us about the hidden cores of the Earth, Mars, Mercury and Venus.
(Photo: SwRI and SSL/Peter Rubin)


Topics: Asteroids, NASA, Planetary Science, Space Exploration


NASA will embark on two missions it says could unlock secrets to how our solar system was formed.

The Lucy and Psyche missions — both robotic, unmanned endeavors controlled from Earth — will take us back to the time 10 million years after the sun was born.

Lucy will visit the Trojan asteroids of Jupiter when it launches in October 2021. Scientists suspect the asteroids, currently caught in the largest planet's 12-year orbit around the sun, may have existed in the beginnings of the solar system and before Jupiter's orbit.

Lucy's principal investigator Harold F. Levison claims the mission will yield other-worldly insight into our universe.

"Because the Trojans are remnants of the primordial material that formed the outer planets, they hold vital clues to deciphering the history of the solar system," he explained. "Lucy, like the human fossil for which it is named, will revolutionize the understanding of our origins."

But don't wait up, Lucy's first stop won't come until 2025 when it arrives at a main belt asteroid. It will examine the Trojans from 2027 to 2033.

USA Today: NASA asteroid missions to discover secrets of the universe, Sean Rossman

Read more…

Hidden Figures...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on January 6, 2017 at 12:47pm
Image Source: Madame Noire
Taraji P. Henson (Katherine Johnson), Janelle Monae (Mary Jackson) and Octavia Spencer (Dorothy Vaughn)


Topics: Diversity, Diversity in Science, NASA, STEM, Women in Science


Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughn, and Mary Jackson are members of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. The Iota Alpha Omega chapter have rented out the Poughkeepsie Galleria as a fundraiser for the sorority and general positive exposure to the public for the organization in general and African Americans in STEM in particular. I was proud to do an electronics STEM fair at the Children's Home of Poughkeepsie in 2014. I will proudly without as much effort support this tonight.

When you think of NASA and Black women, Mae Jemison no doubt comes to mind. But long before Jemison became the first African American woman to travel in space in 1992, there were three women of color already making history at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and now their story will finally be told in the upcoming theatrical release, Hidden Figures.

The movie, which stars Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monae, tells the story of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughn, and Mary Jackson —”brilliant African-American women working at NASA, who served as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in history: the launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit, a stunning achievement that restored the nation’s confidence, turned around the Space Race, and galvanized the world,” a press release relayed.

Madame Noire:
First Look At Hidden Figures, The Untold Story Of NASA’s Black Female Leaders
Brande Victorian

Read more…

Quantum Particles in 1D...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on January 4, 2017 at 7:39am
Figure 1: Castro-Alvaredo et al. [1] and Bertini et al. [2] used a hydrodynamics approach to describe interacting quantum particles in 1D (bottom). The approach takes a zoomed-out picture of the particles (middle), viewing it on a length scale ll that is much longer than the average distance dd between particles. In this way, the particles appear as a continuous medium, like a fluid. A description of the system on a very long length scale LL can then be calculated, such as how its mass density varies in space (top) and how this quantity evolves in time.


Topics: Particle Physics, Quantum Mechanics, Theoretical Physics


Whether attempting to crack the mystery of high-temperature superconductors or describe a cloud of ultracold atoms, theorists face a similar question: What is the best way to model the behavior of many interacting quantum particles? Most models for such systems are extremely hard to solve analytically, or even simulate on a classical computer. In this context, models for one-dimensional (1D) systems are special because they have mathematical properties that often permit an exact mathematical solution. But even these solvable models aren’t ideal for describing real experiments, particularly those involving many out-of-thermal-equilibrium particles, like a cloud of atoms being released from a trap. A way to realize this description for a large class of widely used 1D models has now been reported in two independent papers, one by Olalla Castro-Alvaredo from the University of London, UK [1], and colleagues and the other by Bruno Bertini from the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, and colleagues [2].

A beautiful method of realizing quantum particles in a 1D setting is to confine ultracold atoms in an elongated (cigar-shaped) trap [3]. If the atoms are bosons, this system can be described by the 1D “delta Bose gas.” In this paradigmatic model, particles move solely along a line. They also mutually repel each other, but only when they are at exactly the same position, hence the “delta” in the model’s name. In the absence of an external trapping potential, this model is exactly solvable in the sense that the particles’ energy spectrum can be calculated [4].

APS Viewpoint: A More Efficient Way to Describe Interacting Quantum Particles in 1D
Jérôme Dubail, Institut Jean Lamour, CNRS and Université de Lorraine, Faculté des Sciences, Boulevard des Aiguillettes F-54506 Vandoeuvre-lès-Nancy, France
December 27, 2016• Physics 9, 153

Read more…

Flight of the Falcon...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on January 3, 2017 at 8:40am
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blasts off from Cape Canaveral, Florida April 8, 2016 in this handout photo provided by SpaceX. REUTERS/SpaceX/Handout via Reuters


Topics: Mars, NASA, Science Fiction, Space Exploration, Spaceflight


I invite you to watch the Mars series on National Geographic (trailer below). It appeals to me because all science fiction is speculative, but the series does a superb job of juxtaposition between what is being planned and discussed now and projecting how it might be carried out in the future. Part of our journey to other worlds as a space faring species will be in stuttered, baby steps until the profoundly difficult becomes routine.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX plans to resume flying rockets next week following an investigation into why one of them burst into flames on a launch pad four months ago, the company said on Monday.

In a statement, SpaceX said it expected to launch a Falcon 9 rocket from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base on Jan. 8 to put 10 satellites into orbit for Iridium Communications Inc.

SpaceX had suspended flights after the same model rocket went up in a blaze on Sept. 1 as it was being fueled for a routine pre-launch test in Florida.

The explosion at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida destroyed the $62 million rocket and a $200 million communications satellite.

Space X, owned and operated by Tesla Motors Inc. Chief Executive Officer Musk, has a backlog of more than 70 missions for NASA and commercial customers, worth more than $10 billion.

The company statement said that accident investigators concluded that a canister of helium inside the rocket’s upper-stage oxygen tank had exploded.

In the short term, SpaceX plans to revamp its fueling procedures so that the super-cold liquid oxygen will not build up between the helium tank’s liner and its outer covering, it added.

SpaceX said accumulation of oxygen in a void or buckle in the liner most likely led to the explosion.

Reuters Science: SpaceX aims for Jan. 8 return to flight with Falcon rocket
Reporting by Irene Klotz, Editing by W Simon

Read more…

Nitrogen-Doped Carbon...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on January 2, 2017 at 7:12am


Phenol-urea-formaldehyde (PUF) organic foam were used as precusors for the new monolithic nitrogen-containing microporous cellular activated carbons production. Carbonization and CO2 activation were used to prepare this novel monolithic nitrogen-containing activated carbon foam with both interconnected macroporous and micro/meso- porosity structures from the developed PUF organic foam. The macroporosity corresponded to the connected network of cells with diameters ranging from 100 to 600 µm, and the pinholes in the cell walls had diameters ranging from 1 to 2 µm. The micro/mesoporosity is located at the inner surface of the cells. They can be used just like the classic activated carbon as an adsorbent, catalyst support, energy storage and biological material in various industries, but higher adsorption kinetics. Credit: World Scientific Publishing

Topics: Biology, Biochemistry, Biotechnology, Research


Researchers have developed monolithic, nitrogen-containing, microporous, cellular-activated carbon from phenol-urea-formaldehyde (PUF) organic foam for CO2 and H2 adsorption. The macroporosity corresponded to the connected network of cells with diameters ranging from 100 to 600 μm, and the pinholes in the cell walls had diameters ranging from 1 to 2 μm. The micro/mesoporosity is located at the inner surface of the cells.

Phys.org: Researchers produced nitrogen-doped, cellular-structure-activated carbon


More information: Weigang Zhao et al, Preparation and Characterization of Nitrogen-Containing Cellular Activated Carbon for CO and H Adsorption, Nano (2016). DOI: 10.1142/S1793292017500072
Read more…

Speak Up. Keep Focused. Carry On...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on December 23, 2016 at 9:30am
MANY YOUNG SCIENTISTS ATTEND AAAS’ ANNUAL MEETINGS AND THE ONE HELD IN WASHINGTON, D.C. EARLIER THIS YEAR WAS NO DIFFERENT IN BEING A DRAW FOR EARLY-CAREER SCIENTISTS ACROSS SCIENTIFIC DISCIPLINES. | AAAS/ATLANTIC PHOTO


Topics: Commentary, Diversity, Physics, Politics, Research, Science


CEO Rush Holt was a congressional representative from New Jersey. Prior to that, he worked at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab as a researcher. In his capacity as congressman, he had been one of the few members of our government that had a background in a STEM field. As I said before, sadly and poignantly now there are none.

I thought it appropriate as an end-of-year post. It looks like Dr. Holt is trying to rally the troops (if you're reading this, "us"). Don't be discouraged; don't stop pursuing your dreams. Our love and pursuit of STEM - and I'll include STEAM for artists - is more important now than ever. The future of humanity may well depend upon it.



His encouraging words speak for themselves at the link below.

“If we are not ashamed to think it, we should not be ashamed to say it.” Marcus Tullius Cicero

"In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act." Unknown

In the wake of the presidential election, AAAS CEO Rush Holt acknowledged the concerns of young scientists and engineers in an op-ed calling on them to “Speak up, keep calm and carry on.”

Early-career scientists and engineers may be understandably apprehensive about change in Washington, particularly since “attention to science during the presidential campaign was neither appreciable nor appreciative,” wrote Holt for Motherboard. Still, he urged the next-generation of innovators not to despair.

“Science has faced challenges throughout history, from one administration to the next, but year in and year out it has led to human progress, enriching our culture by improving quality of life and human knowledge about our place in the universe,” Holt wrote.

AAAS CEO to Young Scientists: “Speak Up. Keep Focused. Carry On.”
Ginger Pinholster

2 of 2 blog breaks. I'll resume posting in the New Year on Monday, 2 January 2017.
Read more…

Subatomic Motion Detector...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on December 22, 2016 at 9:00am
Images Sources: See link below

Topics: Atomic Force Microscopy, Nanotechnology, NEMS, NIST, Thin Films

Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a new device that measures the motion of super-tiny particles traversing distances almost unimaginably small—shorter than the diameter of a hydrogen atom, or less than one-millionth the width of a human hair. Not only can the handheld device sense the atomic-scale motion of its tiny parts with unprecedented precision, but the researchers have devised a method to mass produce the highly sensitive measuring tool.

It’s relatively easy to measure small movements of large objects but much more difficult when the moving parts are on the scale of nanometers, or billionths of a meter. The ability to accurately measure tiny displacements of microscopic bodies has applications in sensing trace amounts of hazardous biological or chemical agents, perfecting the movement of miniature robots, accurately deploying airbags and detecting extremely weak sound waves traveling through thin films.

NIST physicists Brian Roxworthy and Vladimir Aksyuk describe their work (link is external) in the Dec. 6, 2016, Nature Communications.

The researchers measured subatomic-scale motion in a gold nanoparticle. They did this by engineering a small air gap, about 15 nanometers in width, between the gold nanoparticle and a gold sheet. This gap is so small that laser light cannot penetrate it.



However, the light energized surface plasmons—the collective, wave-like motion of groups of electrons confined to travel along the boundary between the gold surface and the air.

The researchers exploited the light’s wavelength, the distance between successive peaks of the light wave. With the right choice of wavelength, or equivalently, its frequency, the laser light causes plasmons of a particular frequency to oscillate back and forth, or resonate, along the gap, like the reverberations of a plucked guitar string. Meanwhile, as the nanoparticle moves, it changes the width of the gap and, like tuning a guitar string, changes the frequency at which the plasmons resonate.

NIST Device for Detecting Subatomic-Scale Motion Has Potential Robotics, Homeland Security Applications
Ben Stein

Read more…